Edwin Morgan

Your thorned back
heavily under the creel
you steadily stamped the rising daffodil.

Your set mouth
forgives no-one, not even God's justice
perpetually drowning law with grace.

Your cold eyes
watched your drunken husband come
unsteadily from Sodom home.

Your grained hands
dandled full and sinful cradles.
You built for your children stone walls.

Your yellow hair
burned slowly in a scarf of grey
wildly falling like the mountain spray.

Finally you're alone
among the unforgiving brass,
the slow silences, the sinful glass.

Who never learned,
not even aging, to forgive
our poor journey and our common grave

while the free daffodils
wave in the valleys and on the hills
the deer look down with their instinctive skills,

and the huge sea
in which your brothers drowned sings slow
over the headland and the peevish crow.

ow! reminds me of that phrase, which could be from "the house with the green shutters" (this really is a world tour of scottish lit.), about "sour pints". (alan warner has told endearing anecdotes, in his scrubbed graeme spears' scottish, of seeing iain walking about his childhood town, "the local eccentric" taking his dirty washing down the street to the laundrette perched on his shoulder.) anyway I stumbled upon a selected works of morgan today (carcanet) and rifled through it finding the two of his poems that I did once take to loving ("the death of marilyn monroe", see 'the poetry thread', and "king billy".) I read these two poems on the way out of the city this early evening and it felt like the air was pulsing around me, stretching out to fill the train cabin by contracting around my skin, they ruined me for the rest of the evening. I can't explain it; I'm not sure it was me who said it first but did once say that the best poetry should frighten you and I think this is what morgan managed. or the poems did.

If you ask what my favourite programme is
it has to be that strange world jigsaw final.
After the winner had defeated all his rivals
with harder and harder jigsaws, he had to prove his mettle
by completing one last absolute mindcrusher
on his own, under the cameras, in less than a week.
We saw, but he did not, what the picture would be:
the mid-Atlantic, photographed from a plane,
as featureless a stretch as could be found,
no weeds, no flotsam, no birds, no oil, no ships,
the surface neither stormy nor calm, but ordinary,
a light wind on a slowly rolling swell.
Hand-cut by a fiendish jigger to simulate,
but not to have, identical beaks and bays,
it seemed impossible; but the candidate---
he said he was a stateless person, called himself Smith---
was impressive: small, dark, nimble, self-contained.
The thousands of little grey tortoises were scattered
on the floor of the studio; we saw the clock; he started.
His food was brought to him, but he hardly ate.
He had a bed, with the light only dimmed to a weird blue,
never out. By the first day he had established
the edges, saw the picture was three metres long
and appeared to represent (dear God!) the sea.
Well, it was a man's life, and the silence
(broken only by sighs, click of wood, plop of coffee
in paper cups) that kept me fascinated.
Even when one hand was picking the edge-pieces
I noticed his other hand was massing sets
of distinguishing ripples or darker cross-hatching or
incipient wave-crests; his mind,
if not his face, worked like a sea.
It was when he suddenly rose from his bed
at two, on the third night, went straight over
to one piece and slotted it into a growing central patch,
then back to bed, that I knew he would make it.
On the sixth day he looked haggard and slow,
with perhaps a hundred pieces left,
of the most dreary unmarked lifeless grey.
The camera showed the clock more frequently.
He roused himself, and in a quickening burst
of activity, with many false starts, began
to press that inhuman insolent remnant together.
He did it, on the evening of the sixth day.
People streamed onto the set. Bands played.
That was fine. But what I liked best
was the last shot of the completed sea,
filling the screen; then the saw-lines disappeared,
till almost imperceptibly the surface moved
and it was again the real Atlantic, glad
to distraction to be released, raised
above itself in growing gusts, allowed
to roar as rain drove down and darkened,
allowed to blot, for a moment, the orderer's hand.

Carcanet's New Selected Poems is an essential purchase. There's a tendency in Scottish Studies to overpraise writers for their, well, Scottishness, but Morgan really is a world class poet. And while he's identified with Glasgow, he's very much a cosmopolitan. He's an inspirational figure really.
Generations of Scottish school children have been introduced to concrete and sound poetry via him. How wonderful is that?
I've been reading and rereading his work lately as part of my masters dissertation. His Sonnets From Scotland from 1984 are superb. Having just read De Quincey's Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, Morgan's sonnett De Quincey In Glasgow really struck me. A visionary Glasgow poem - something Morgan, and sadly too few others, is a master at:

When afternoons grew late, he feared and longed
for dusk. In that high room in Rottenrow
he looks out east to the Necropolis
Its crowded tombs rise jostling, living, thronged
with shadows, and the granite-bloodying glow
flares on the dripping bronze of a used kris.

His love poems are beautiful. Deeply touching, but gorgeously sensuous too.

Of his concrete poems, this is a favourite:

Siesta of a Hungarian Snake

s sz sz SZ sz SZ sz ZS zs Zs zs zs z

Interesting to see Crichton-Smith, Muir and Morgan come up on ILB. I read most of C-S and Muir's stuff many years ago, also some but less Morgan who seemed too wilfully cerebral for my tastes - admittedly an opinion based on a fairly superficial acquaintance. Strawberries is an obvious and very beautiful exception, although I know it from having heard it read more recently on tv or radio I think - I don't remember seeing it in print before I spotted this thread. In the end I thought CS a fairly modest talent tbh, and even Muir, though definitely more interesting, is a bit bloodless, going from dream-and-myth abstractions to moral abstractions without taking in much of the stink of life. His Autobiography is exceptional, more interesting than his poetry IMO, and he seems to have been an incredibly nice man.

https://youtube/HyLqbTjSNoo

... didn't work, did it?

https://wwww.youtube/HyLqbTjSNoo

... or that.

https://www.youtube/HyLqbTjSNoo

... I know when I'm beat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyLqbTjSNoo

The boy done good.

will gie it a listen when I'm hame (am at work at the mo)

loved reading edwin morgan in school. perhaps my favourite thing that i had to read for english class.